We Need to Talk About Putin: Why the West Gets Him Wrong

Chapter 2: Putin Was KGB, But Not as You Know It

At the end of 1999, Putin was prime minister, and would soon be elected president. He was attending a party held at the Lubyanka, the nineteenth-century building which had been designed for an insurance company but gained infamy as the headquarters of successive Soviet secret police agencies. Even today, although the main offices of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB’s current successor, are in an anonymous grey block on the other side of the road, it still uses the Lubyanka, and the gala event was being held there to celebrate the founding of the Cheka, the very first Bolshevik political police.

‘Dear comrades,’ Putin toasted, ‘I can report that the group of agents you sent to infiltrate the government has accomplished the first part of its mission.’ He was not entirely joking. Putin had not only been in the KGB, the notorious Soviet intelligence and security agency – he had been a fan of it from an early age. He had wanted to join while still at school, and went to the KGB’s regional headquarters in the so-called Bolshoi Dom – ‘the Big House’ – on Liteyny Avenue, close to the Neva River in Leningrad’s central neighbourhood. This slab-sided building had an infamous reputation, having previously been the offices of Stalin’s secret police, where supposed enemies of the state had been executed in blood-drenched basement rooms and through which a steady flow of victims had passed to the Gulag labour camps. Yet teenage Putin popped by for a chat. One can only guess at the reaction of the KGB officer who spoke to Putin, but he was told to go away and either do his military service or graduate from university first. What degree was best, Putin asked? Any would do, but when pushed the officer suggested law. And so it was: Putin went to Leningrad State University, graduated with a law degree in 1975 and joined the KGB. He would remain in the service for seventeen years, and these were the years that many feel shaped him. ‘I looked into Mr Putin’s eyes,’ US Senator John McCain once said after meeting him, ‘and I saw three things: a K, a G and a B.’

Putin still identifies strongly with the so-called Chekists. Many of his closest allies are veterans of the KGB and its successors, and he retains close connections with the security agencies. He did not coin the phrase ‘There is no such thing as a former KGB officer,’ but he certainly lives it.

Of course, this experience clearly played a role in the development of his world view, but it does not explain it entirely and there are other seminal experiences to examine. There was his hard-knocks childhood in Leningrad, when he lived in a single room in a cramped and crowded communal apartment with neither a bath nor hot water. There young Vladimir got into judo and sambo, the Soviet military martial art, perhaps as a way of protecting himself or of finding a community. His early lessons in the streets and the ring certainly seem to have left a mark, impressing on him a belief that confidence and determination can make up for strength and wealth. In a television interview in 2018, for example, he drew a parallel between geopolitics and martial arts: when trying to explain how Russia could exert more global authority than the West anticipates, he noted that fighters who succeed are not only strong, and those who are defeated are not necessarily physically weak, but ‘something is missing. Either willpower or patience, or commitment or courage. Something wasn’t enough. Something was lacking.’ Childhood friends he made back then, such as the billionaire Rotenberg brothers (with whom he sparred) and the cellist Sergei Roldugin, are still important to him today. Perhaps – dipping into the shallowest of pop psychology – the marginal and insecure nature of his childhood also contributed to a later commitment to ensuring that he was safe and comfortable, and that no one had power over him.

After his time in the KGB, there were the anarchic 1990s, when the new Russia appeared to be spiralling into chaos and nobody knew if tomorrow’s pay cheque would come, and what it would buy. All the old values seemed lost and devalued, and the only new ones seemed to be to seize opportunities and make a fast buck when you could. These were the days when Putin started working at the mayor’s office in St Petersburg – his home city, its pre-Revolutionary name restored – and rose to become deputy mayor, before moving to Moscow. There, he was rapidly promoted, going from deputy head of the Presidential Property Management Directorate (1996–7) to deputy head and then first deputy head of the Presidential Administration (1997–8), head of the FSB (1998–9) and prime minister (1999). If before joining the KGB Putin was the rootless outsider youngster looking for the right gang to join, after it, he was part of a group of insiders who were taking full advantage of every opportunity those unsettled times threw up, notably the so-called Ozero Dacha Cooperative which I will discuss in Chapter 4.

These experiences left their marks on Putin as much as his time in the KGB. However, it is interesting to wonder how far before and after his service he has been chasing and idolising a fantasy image of the spooks rather than the reality. In his autobiography, First Person, he admits that before he joined the KGB, his picture of the agency came from spy stories, films and television programmes. The appeal was less the tradecraft or the nature of the missions as much as the sense that a spy really mattered. As he put it, ‘I was most amazed by how a small force, a single person, really, can accomplish something an entire army cannot. A single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of thousands of people. At least, that’s how I saw it.’

This thought that a single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of thousands., one might suggest, was what gave a scrappy kid from the wrong side of Leningrad an idea of how to get power and a sense of significance. The irony is that while he has, since then, become the lord of the spies, his actual career in the KGB was perhaps less distinguished than he might have liked.

After all, there were KGB officers and KGB officers. For all the artfully crafted mythology built around him, Putin was never some Soviet James Bond. He was at first posted in counter-intelligence, but in 1985, in part a result of his good command of German, he was sent to Dresden, in Communist East Germany. At this point, he transferred to the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, its foreign espionage division, though he never left the German Democratic Republic and seems largely to have been collating records and debriefing Soviet and East German citizens who travelled abroad. He filed reports for others to read, got plump on German beer (he admits to putting on 25 pounds), saved money to buy a car and generally lived a comfortable life. His was not exactly a glittering career, and when Viktor Kryuchkov, who had been head of the First Chief Directorate at the time, was later asked about Putin, he had to admit that he had never heard of him.

As a result of that posting, Putin missed the reformist excitement of the Soviet Union in the later 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev began to peel away the decades of repression and stagnation. Instead, his experience was of the once-disciplined German Democratic Republic falling apart around him, as Moscow essentially allowed the Germans to go their own way. While crowds besieged their offices, the KGB officers burned documents by the armful and pleaded for protection from the local Soviet garrison, but the Chekists were told they could do nothing without orders from Moscow, ‘and Moscow is silent’.

For Putin, the lesson seems not to have been that all empires fall, and the bloodier ones tend to fall harder. Nor even that the Soviet system had proven beyond reform. Rather, that the real problem of the USSR was that, in his own words, ‘it had a terminal disease without cure – a paralysis of power’. As president, he would demonstrate a determination to prove that the state retains both power and the will to use it. He has some of the tradecraft of the trained security service officer, especially when it comes to identifying and exploiting people’s vulnerabilities, but his experiences were from the late KGB, one driven not by dreams of Marxist-Leninist glory but corrupt self-interest. He did not witness the positive side of Gorbachev’s perestroika reform programme, just the cataclysmic outcomes, which he is clearly keen are not repeated.

He was also pretty mediocre at the job, so while he might look to the KGB’s successors as his natural allies and constituents, there is also an element of ‘wannabe-ness’ about this relationship. He has, for example, blessed the growth of what is almost a personality cult around Yuri Andropov, who was head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982 and General Secretary of the Communist Party for fifteen months in 1982–4, before succumbing to kidney failure. In 1999, Putin put flowers on Andropov’s grave to mark the eighty-fifth anniversary of his birth, and a year later he placed a plaque commemorating him on the building where he had lived. In 2004, he even saw that a statue to the man was erected in St Petersburg. Meanwhile, he periodically invokes Andropov’s memory as a brilliant intellect and an unswervingly ruthless patriot, and has encouraged an explosion in the number of articles and books about his life and times.

The irony is, I doubt Andropov would be as keen on Putin. He was a complex figure and certainly no bleeding heart – he sent dissidents to mental hospitals and presided over the crushing of both Hungary’s 1956 uprising and Czechoslovakia’s ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968 – but he was also an ascetic and a realist. Putin likes to pretend to be tough on corruption, but in practice it has become central to his whole style of rule, as I will discuss in Chapter 4. He also lives a life of opulent comfort, with palaces outside Moscow and on the Black Sea, and even exercises in a £2,500 tracksuit. Andropov, by contrast, lived an austere lifestyle, keeping the same flat even as he rose through the system; as a Russian television documentary put it, he had ‘one suit, one overcoat and his children and grandchildren rode the metro’. He also oversaw a bloody anti-corruption campaign that saw fifteen ministers sacked and embezzlers and profiteers tried and shot. Although he was a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist-Leninist, time and again he demonstrated an unwillingness to swallow propaganda unquestioningly and be satisfied with the comforting lies subordinates would feed their bosses. While he was an outstanding head of the KGB, he came to the agency as an outsider, a Party loyalist who would tame and modernise the thuggish murder machine the Soviets had inherited from Stalin. He never let himself be house-trained, and his experience meant that he knew how his people would attempt to doctor what they told him, even when they thought they were doing it in his own best interests.

By contrast, Putin appears both politically and psychologically dependent on his spooks, even though he never acquired the kind of insider knowledge required to understand how they work (and when they don’t). Russia has a number of intelligence and security services, four of which are the most significant. The FSB, a domestic counter-intelligence agency that seems more devoted to crushing political opposition than anything else, is the closest successor to the old KGB. Although corruption is something of a constant in Russian officialdom, the FSB is especially infamous for it, thanks to its virtual freedom from the law. Putin ran the FSB in 1998–9 and still treats it with the greatest indulgence. The SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, is essentially the KGB’s First Chief Directorate – it has a different acronym but the same role and even the same headquarters at Yasenevo in southern Moscow. The SVR specialises in human intelligence, planting deep-cover moles abroad and recruiting foreign agents. The GRU, or Main Intelligence Directorate, is military intelligence – technically it has simply been the GU, or Main Directorate, since 2010, but everyone in Moscow still calls it the ‘Gru’ and Putin has suggested restoring the old name. They are a much more gung-ho agency, doing everything from running spies and hacking computers to controlling Russia’s Spetsnaz, or special forces. Finally, there is the Federal Protection Service, the FSO, which is Putin’s Praetorian Guard and includes not just the sunglasses-and-dark-suit-wearing ‘bullet-catchers’ of the presidential security detail, but also the goose-stepping riflemen of the Kremlin Guard.

As with every aspect of the adhocracy, whatever their official roles, in practice the activities of these agencies overlap. The political policemen of the FSB also run missions abroad; the SVR sets up commando teams; the GRU does political intelligence; and the FSO snoops on them all. The result, at least in theory, is that they have an incentive to be aggressive and imaginative, as they compete for Putin’s favour. It should also help him control them by playing them off against each other, and double-check the information from one with that from the others.

Of course, it often doesn’t work like that. Like so many authoritarian leaders, Putin has over time become less and less willing to listen to alternative perspectives. As one former Russian spy told me, the intelligence agencies have learned that ‘you do not bring bad news to the tsar’s table’. As with everything under Putin, politics around intelligence is competitive to the point of cannibalism. In 2003, the Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information (FAPSI), Russia’s electronic snooping agency comparable to Britain’s GCHQ or the US NSA, was eaten up by its rivals, divvied up between the FSB, FSO and GRU. So they all compete to tell Putin what they think he wants to hear, to flatter his prejudices and to reassure him that everything is going well. Officials I have spoken to at the Russian foreign ministry, for example, gloomily admit that Putin turns to FSB assessments of what’s happening abroad before their own – this would be like the British prime minister asking MI5 about the latest news from Germany.

Putin typically starts his workday in the early afternoon (he is late to bed and late to rise) with a trio of leather-bound briefing files: the FSB’s report on domestic affairs, the SVR’s on developments around the world and the FSO’s on what is going on within the Russian elite. In other words, his first and main introduction to each day comes from his spooks. Furthermore, there is a vicious cycle of escalating claims and conspiracy theories, as the various services compete for the boss’s attention with ever-more-lurid allegations. When Putin claims that the West is trying to undermine him, that Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis or that a secret ‘deep state’ conspiracy dominates Washington, is he just posturing, or is he in fact repeating eye-catching nonsense from intelligence briefings that aim to enthral rather than educate him?

Putin is still a spook fanboy, without much fieldwork under his belt and with limited managerial experience in the services. But he likes, trusts and listens to them. At the same time, without meaning to, he is King Lear to his ambitious daughters, apportioning his kingdom based on how well they flatter him. So, of course, they do. While Putin certainly controls Russia’s intelligence agencies, how far do they control or at least influence him in return, through the picture of the world they paint?